1 July 2011

Who knows, maybe I’m just a Silicon Valley guy who has lost touch with reality. It’s entirely possible. But maybe, just maybe, the opposite is true. Maybe “regular” people have been allergic to using groups in the past because they simply don’t want to use groups. Maybe it’s one of those things that’s a good idea on paper or in a brain-storming session, but doesn’t translate onto the web.

That’s a very interesting theory — as a geek, I love the idea of Circles (like Diaspora’s aspects), but are regular users ever going to be interested in that concept at all?

Not to mention that I’d already planned to post that quote yesterday, before getting my own invite to Google+, but now I’m in and I can tell that the interface for Circles sucks. Sure, the concept is viable, but there are lots of little missteps that make it annoying and confusing (UI elements jumping around, semi-compulsory multiple selection, an unintuitive flow to simply see a prospective contact’s profile, and a bunch of other tiny details that mount up). In short, Google has made the interface uncharacteristically flashy… but they still haven’t gotten user-friendly.

Within hours, the early Plus invitees were actually using Google Plus for conversations. Not just nattering back and forth, not just comments on the service itself, but real conversations.

That’s fundamentally different from Google Wave, where I rarely saw any discussion that wasn’t about Wave itself.

Interestingly, I’ve seen the same with my contacts — and I really don’t know why that would be. I don’t share stuff on Facebook nor on Plus, so I have no idea what motivates those people to actually start posting to Plus this time.

Horowitz also took time to dispel the rumor that a suspension of a Google+ account means that a user loses his or her access to Gmail, Google Docs or other Google services. “When an account is suspended for violating the Google+ common name standards, access to Gmail or other products that don’t require a Google+ profile are not removed,” he said.

Is he saying that all the testimonies to the contrary were lies? I’m not buying it. I’d be a lot more confident if they said that disabling Gmail accounts was a mistake and they’ll never do it again — but denying that it ever happened in the face, of so many articles? This whole thing is a giant screw-up and they’re making it worse by the day.

Fab.com, which started out as Fabulis, a social networking site for gay men, has not only recently changed its name but also started from scratch with an entirely new business centered around online flash sales of design items.